The German-language region
in Europe

With
82.3 million people Germany is
by far the
largest German-speaking
country in Europe.

Two
thirds of the 7.3 million
people living in
Switzerland speak German
as a first
language.

Austria's
population is about 8.1 million
people.

According to its Bylaws, United
Christian Outreach Germany's mission is
to support the preaching of the gospel
of the Kingdom of God in the German
language and to promote the pastoral
care of German-speaking believers in the
Federal Republic of Germany and in other
German-speaking countries in Europe. The
German-language region of Europe is
obviously our focus of attention.

German is the language most widely
spoken as a first language within the
European Union. Within Europe as a whole,
German is the native language of about 100
million people, making it second only to
Russian (Russia is not a member of the
European Union). The vast majority of
native German speakers live in Austria,
Germany and Switzerland (see the maps on
the left for population figures).

However, these are not the only
countries in Europe where German is spoken.
The small country of Liechtenstein, located
between Austria and Switzerland, is
German-speaking. Nearly all residents of
Luxembourg speak high-German, since their
own main oral language,
Lëtzebuergesch, is originally a
German dialect dating back to about the 4th
century A.D.

In addition, there is a sizeable
German-speaking community of about 100,000
people in eastern Belgium, and
approximately two thirds of the people who
live in Italy's northern province of Tirol
are native German speakers, numbering over
250,000. Special statutes in both countries
give German speakers certain language
rights, enabling them to conduct legal
matters, etc. in their own language. The
German language also has regional status in
Alsace-Lorraine (in France), the Czech
Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland and
Romania.

A study published by the German
government at the end of 2001 documents 145
million people in the EU who speak German,
including those Europeans who speak German
as a second language. Thus, German ranks
well ahead of French (105 million speakers)
and trails only English in Europe with its
estimated 176 million speakers. German is
also widely spoken in Eastern Europe, home
to the European Union's newest members.

Counting only those books published in
Germany, over 60,000 new books are
published in German each year, equivalent
to 18% of all books published worldwide,
making the German-language the third
largest published language in books. In
addition, German ranks among the ten most
frequently spoken languages in today's
world.

The German language is also well represented
on the internet. The second most widely used
language on the internet is German (English is
in first place). The search engine Google
estimates that 12 percent of all searches made
using Google are in the German language. After
the domain "com", the national domain for Germany
– "de" – is the second most widely
used internet domain in the world.